Blind God's Bluff A Billy Fox Novel - By Richard Lee Byers Page 0,109

had a floundering idiot for a rider, the horse stopped running. Something rumbled and clattered behind me.

I looked around. The MC12 was gone, too. Now Timon was driving a buggy, and two white horses with glowing blue eyes were pulling it. Nearly dumping me off again, my horse jumped out of its way.

I kind of understood what had happened. The rules said Timon and I would race through Tampa. But I hadn’t specified modern Tampa, and he’d rolled back time to before there were cars. Which meant we couldn’t have them. I flashed the Thunderbird, laying it on top of my horse’s head, but I couldn’t change it back.

But hey, no problem. It wasn’t like I didn’t know anything about horses. I’d taken a pony ride once, at a school carnival when I was nine years old. And I’d thrown away a lot of money betting on them.

All that—or maybe the movies—had at least taught me that you were supposed to put your feet in the stirrups and steer the horse with the reins. I fumbled around and found them both, while Timon’s buggy disappeared into the night.

I also thought that if you made a clucking noise, or flicked the reins, a horse would move. Mine didn’t. I kicked backward with my heels, and that did the trick. I kept it up until we were galloping.

The horse got instant revenge for the kicking, as the saddle spanked me again and again. Eventually I tried standing up in the stirrups. That helped, but made me feel even more like I was in imminent danger of falling off.

I didn’t sit back down, though, and I didn’t let the horse slow down, either. We chased the buggy’s clatter, and then the carriage itself when I could make it out in the dark. Gradually we pulled up even with it.

Timon twisted on his bench and his grimy, wrinkled face snarling, snapped a whip in my direction.

The lash cracked across my horse’s head. It veered away from the buggy and stopped, almost pitching me over its head. I tried to kick it into motion again, but it bucked and reared. I just had time to notice my feet had slipped out of the stirrups, and then I went flying over its ass.

I slammed down hard and cracked my head against a street that was now made of cobblestones, not asphalt. The shock dazed me, made me want to lie still, and I fought my way through that. I filled up with Red and used his power to fix any damage the fall had done.

Then, still a little shaky, I stood up. The horse had run away, and I was still in the past, without an electric light, telephone pole, or parked car in sight. I flashed the Thunderbird and concentrated, willing my car to reappear in front of me. It didn’t.

That only left one option. Still burning Red’s mojo, I sprinted after the buggy.

I ran faster than I ever could have in real life, even with my Ka juicing me. But I still didn’t see Timon again until I was all the way out of Hyde Park and onto the street that almost certainly wasn’t called Kennedy Boulevard yet. And then he was still way ahead of me. There was no chance I could catch him on my own.

So it was a good thing I had another partner lying in wait.

As the buggy pounded and rattled onto the bridge that arched across the Hillsborough River, Murk rose to the surface. The first sweep of a tentacle smashed the buggy to pieces and laid the team out flat. One horse lay pulped and motionless. The other screamed and kicked with legs that bent in too many places.

But Timon stood up, bleeding from a cut on his head, from the middle of the wreckage. “Traitor!” he howled, and when a second tentacle reached for him, he snapped his fingers. The end of Murk’s tentacle burst into flame, and he had to dunk it in the river to put it out.

They went back and forth like that for a while, the kraken reaching, slipping some of his tentacles under the bridge to attack from both sides at once, and Timon counterattacking with fire. The Pharaoh took it all in from the center of the bridge, apparently not worried that Murk would pulverize him by accident.

Wheezing, my heart pounding despite all Red could do, I reached the foot of the bridge. Then shadowy forms appeared on black surface of